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Religion is a powerful weapon that can be used because it persuades people to do things. And thus it can be used for good or ill. But it should not be a powerful weapon at all.

Richard Dawkins

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Richard Dawkins
Age: 83
Born: 1941
Born: March 26
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More quotes by Richard Dawkins

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If people think God is interesting, the onus is on them to show that there is anything there to talk about. Otherwise they should just shut up about it.
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The evidence for evolution is so compelling that the only way to save the creation theory is to assume that God deliberately planted enormous quantities of evidence to make it look as if evolution had happened.
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[Richard Leakey is] a robust hero of a man, who actually lives up to the cliché, “a big man in every sense of the word.” Like other big men he is loved by many, feared by some, and not over-preoccupied with the judgments of any.
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Commonsense lets us down, because commonsense evolved in a world where nothing moves very fast, and nothing is very small or very large the mundane world of the familiar.
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I don't shout people down. I argue people down, perhaps.
Richard Dawkins
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My objection to supernatural beliefs is precisely that they miserably fail to do justice to the sublime grandeur of the real world. They represent a narrowing-down from reality, an impoverishment of what the real world has to offer.
Richard Dawkins
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Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.
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What is the purpose of the universe? is a silly question.
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We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realize that we are apes.
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bad things, like good things don't happen any more often than they ought to by chance. the universe has no mind, no feelings, and no personality, so it doesn't do things in order to either hurt or please you. bad things happen because things happen.
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The true scientific understanding of the nature of existence is so utterly fascinating how could you not want people to share it? Carl Sagan, I think, said 'when you're in love, you want to tell the world.' And who, on understanding a scientific view of reality, would not, as it were, fall in love and want to tell the world.
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You can't understand European history at all other than through religion, or English literature either if you can't recognise biblical allusions.
Richard Dawkins
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Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction).
Richard Dawkins
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You can make some inferences about a man's character if you know something about the conditions in which he has survived and prospered.
Richard Dawkins
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I guess there are some rights of parents with what they choose their children to learn, but I'm biased in favor of freeing children to learn and not letting parents be too doctrinaire in indoctrinating their children.
Richard Dawkins
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We don't need fossils - the case for evolution is watertight without them so it is paradoxical to use gaps in the fossil record as though they were evidence against evolution
Richard Dawkins
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Cloning may be good and it may be bad. Probably it's a bit of both. The question must not be greeted with reflex hysteria but decided quietly, soberly and on its own merits. We need less emotion and more thought.
Richard Dawkins
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Molecular evidense suggests that our common ancestor with the chimpanzees lived, in Africa, between 5 and 7 million years ago, say half a million generations ago. This is not long by evolutionary standards.
Richard Dawkins
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However brief our time in the sun, if we waste a second of it, or complain that it is dull or barren or (like a child) boring, couldn't this be seen as a callous insult to those unborn trillions who will never even be offered life in the first place?
Richard Dawkins
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Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immorality that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false.
Richard Dawkins